At its June meeting the San Angelo ISD Board of Trustees received the report on the MAP Test results for the 2024-2025 school year. Whether another layer of standardized testing is beneficial for students is hotly debated. It will certainly be beneficial for some teachers—at least the ones who receive a Teacher Incentive Allotment based on their students academic growth.
Before we can grapple with the MAP Test it is good to have an understanding of what standardized testing takes place year round in San Angelo Schools. In this article we are not including standardized testing for college admissions, such as the TSIA, PSAT, ACT and SAT. What standardized tests are required by the Districts depend to a certain extent on what grade level the student is.
SAISD Standardized Testing
Of course, the grandaddy of them all is the STAAR Test. This is the big end of the year test on which everything depends in public education. It is an imperfect measure of academic performance, and unpopular across the state with students and educators alike.
It is so unpopular the 89th legislature came as close as it ever has to doing away with it completely this year.
One of its primary criticisms is that it is one test, on one day, and does not gauge student academic growth during the school year. Thus it does not provide educators an accurate picture of how the student is growing academically during the school year. The test also does not differentiate between college-bound and military/work-bound students.
STAAR is required testing in elementary, middle school and high school. To understand the number of STAAR tests students are required to take we can look at the testing schedule in SAISD for 2025.
Elementary STAAR Tests 2025
| Tuesday, April 15, 2025 | 3rd and 4th Grade Reading Language Arts |
| Wednesday, April 16, 2025 | 5th Grade Reading Language Arts |
| Thursday, April 17, 2025 | STAAR Makeup (Elementary Reading Language Arts) |
| Tuesday, April 22, 2025 | 5th Grade Science |
| Thursday, April 24, 2025 | STAAR Makeup (5th Grade Science) |
| Tuesday, April 29, 2025 | 3rd and 4th Grade Math |
| Wednesday, April 30, 2025 | 5th Grade Math |
| Thursday, May 1, 2025 | STAAR Makeup (Elementary Math) |
Middle School STAAR Tests 2025
| Tuesday, April 15, 2025 | 8th Grade Reading Language Arts |
| Wednesday, April 16, 2025 | 6th and 7th Grade Reading Language Arts |
| Thursday, April 17, 2025 | STAAR Makeup (Middle School Reading Language Arts) |
| Tuesday, April 22, 2025 | 8th Grade Science |
| Wednesday, April 23, 2025 | 8th Grade Social Studies |
| Thursday, April 24, 2025 | STAAR Makeup (8th Grade Science and Social Studies) |
| Tuesday, April 29, 2025 | 8th Grade Math |
| Wednesday, April 30, 2025 | 6th and 7th Grade Math |
| Thursday, May 1, 2025 | STAAR Makeup (Middle School Math) |
High School STAAR Tests
| December 9-13, 2024 | High School EOC Retesting Opportunity |
| Tuesday, April 15, 2025 | English I EOC |
| Wednesday, April 16, 2025 | English II EOC |
| Thursday, April 17, 2025 | STAAR Makeup (English I and II EOC) |
| Tuesday, April 22, 2025 | Biology EOC |
| Wednesday, April 23, 2025 | US History EOC |
| Thursday, April 24, 2025 | STAAR Makeup (Biology and US History) |
| Tuesday, April 29, 2025 | Algebra I EOC |
| Thursday, May 1, 2025 | STAAR Makeup (Algebra I) |
On top of this daunting schedule, SAISD added the MAP Test last year at multiple grade levels.
What Is The MAP Test?
MAP, stands for Measures of Academic Progress. The full name of the assessment is MAP Growth. It is put out by the Northwest Education Association. MAP is an adaptive assessment that measures students’ achievement and growth in K–12 math, reading, language usage, and science. It has become a very popular method for evidence based academic assessment across the country. It is given three times a year in reading and language arts and math in SAISD. Thus, it adds at least six more standardized testing days per student per year. Schedules for MAP testing are determined by each campus.
MAP is based on a national standard. This allows the district to compare its performance to national benchmarks. This also means that your student is being compared to other students performance nationally as opposed to the state.
Why Did SAISD Add More Testing
The simple answer is so SAISD teachers could be eligible for the Teacher Incentive Allotments from the Texas Education Agency.
Under that program teachers are paid bonuses based on performance. Several factors are included in making those awards. One of those is academic growth.
While the District emphasizes MAP as a tool that provides data which educators can use to make adjustments during the school year to help students learn, its primary purpose is to gauge growth from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. That is because that is what TEA looks at for awarding Teacher Incentive Allotments.
Understanding MAP Results
To understand the results presented to the Board, it is helpful to first understand the color code used by NWEA.
Map is a national norm assessment and uses color codes to provide a visual snapshot that purportedly helps educators identify areas of strength and weakness in order to make adjustments during the school year.
When reading the results it is important to remember that MAP tests student growth not academic achievement. In other words a student can be a high academic achiever but underperform in academic growth.
- Green and Blue -exceeding performance and have high growth
- Yellow – maintaining performance and growth on pace for one year growth
- Red and Orange – underperforming and low growth
SAISD MAP Results
Algebra 1 Grades 8 and 9
The Algebra 1 MAP results for 8th and 9th grade gives an example of the kind of information and comparisons that are possible.
Here you see 8th grade students growth in Algebra 1 is much higher both in 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 than it is in 9th grade.
Primarily this is attributed to the fact the students who choose to take Algebra I early in 8th grade tend to be high performers in mathematics. As you can see the blue-green patterns for 8th grader perform higher than do those in 9th grade. Largely this is because students who find math more challenging tend to take Algebra I in ninth grade, not eight grade.
Still, what we see is that 69% of 9th grade students maintained or exceeded growth in 2024-2025, whereas 53% showed the same in 2023-2024 school year. You also see improvement in the red and orange between 23-24 and 24-25.
Grades 3-8 Math
MAP results were also reviewed for math in grades 3-8.
The District only began using MAP as a growth assessment tool in these grades in 24-25, so there is no data to compare growth year to year. But staff did present the growth results from the beginning and end of year testing.
This is the first complete year of MAP testing data for these grades. This is a benchmark to start from for future year comparisons. These results show only beginning of year assessment and end of year assessment, not middle of year assessment. Middle of year was not included in this report because mid-year results are not considered for determining teacher incentive allotments.
Reading and Language Arts
The same goes for the MAP results for reading and language arts, which are shown below.
English I and II Grades 9 and 10
The Board also received a similar report for English I and II reading component for grades 9 and 10.
Summary of SAISD Results
According to SAISD, the results show that in reading and language arts grades 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10, and in math grades 5, 6, 8 and Algebra, there was an increase in the number of students meeting or exceeding national growth measures from the 23-24 to 24-25 school years.
But this is only partially correct. The district has no data to compare for the 2023-2024 school year other than Algebra I for grades 8 and 9. What the data presented for the other grades and subjects does show is growth from the beginning of the school year (BOY) to end of year (EOY).
Criticism of MAP Testing
No standardized test is perfect, and MAP is not without its critics.
Some argue that knowing a rate of change of a student, compared to a national standard, does not provide any useful information to help the student learn. They claim the real measure of growth is not what the students growth is compared to students nationwide, but compared to themselves.
While MAP does identify areas of weakness and strength, that by itself does not mean effective changes will be made to improve growth during the school year. That will depend on how the administration uses the raw data in working with individual teachers and students. That will be a gargantuan task with 14,400 students district-wide.
In 2012 one study found that overall, the MAP program did not have a statistically significant impact on students’ reading achievement in either grade 4 or grade 5. Cordray, D., Pion, G., Brandt, C., Molefe, A., Toby, M. The Impact of the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) Program on Student Reading Achievement (Publication No. NCEE 2013–4000). National Center for Educational Evaluation and Regional Assistance, 2012.
There are also complaints that how the test is scored is not very transparent and it is adaptive, and hard to judge how seriously students are taking it since it is not a mandatory test with real world consequences for the student.
What About TEKS and STAAR?
Another criticism is that MAP is not aligned to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills state curriculum and the STAAR test. It is also untimed and uses algorithms to assess the difficulty of questions answered by a student, whether the questions are too easy or too hard, whether they are gong too fast or too slow, and adjusts accordingly.
The legislature considered breaking the STAAR test into two or three tests during the school year rather than have one end of year test. That proposal did not pass.
Is MAP Testing Best For Student Outcomes?
The jury is out on whether more and different standardized testing will actually help students learn. MAP was primarily implemented so SAISD teachers could be eligible to participate in the Teacher Incentive Allotment program.
There has been no attempt on the part of TEA to integrate this sort of testing with TEKS or the STAAR. That could be a major problem when it comes time for STAAR. The STAAR is still the test on which the state, parents and taxpayers will judge SAISD.
One outcome could be that some teachers receive the incentive awards, while others do not, based on the students they teach and nothing else.
Part of the purpose of the Teacher Incentive Allotment is to financially incentive the best teachers to work with the poorest performing students. While laudable, this population may also be the one with the highest growth potential. So will teachers be penalized in receiving incentives for teaching high performing students who may show less growth?
If all of your best teachers focus on the lowest performing students, this could have a negative impact on the growth of higher performing students, who are not sufficiently challenged, and might that impact the districts college, military and career readiness overall? We do not know whether that will in fact be the case, but these are important things to be watching as we move forward.
Then there is the concern of the constant increase, and demand for standardized testing. Administrators, both state and local, love data. They especially love data that shows a positive trend. But don’t we all. The problem is, so far as we can tell, there seems to be no data that correlates standardized testing scores with better learning and more engaged students.
